rarely have been surpassed by much for long.
I’ve been on team AMD for over 20 years now but that’s not true. The CoreDuo and the first couple of I CPUS were better than what AMD was offering and were for a decade. The Athlon were much better than the Pentium 3 and P4, the Ryzen are better than the current I series but the Phenom weren’t. Don’t get me wrong, I like my Phenom II X4 but it objectively wasn’t as good as Intel’s offerings back in the day.
I’d say that regardless of the brand, X86 CPU don’t need to be upgraded as often as they used to. No awesome new extension like SSE or something like that, not much more powerful, power consumption not going down significantly. If you don’t care about power consumption, the server CPU will be more interesting, there’s no doubt about that.